Episode #2

“It had been dark at the beach for hours, he hadn't been smoking much and it wasn't headlights – but before she turned away, he could swear he saw light falling on her face, the orange light just after sunset that catches a face turned to the west, watching the ocean for someone to come in on the last wave of the day, in to shore and safety.”

Sprawling yet intimate…digressive yet focused…surfing curlicued wavelengths of obsession and obfuscation—such is a fairly apt way of describing the tone of Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice; it’s also a fair assessment of tonight’s megaconversation between our host and writer Kim Morgan.

Inherent Vice. The death of the 1960s. Regret. Obsession. Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood. The melancholy of oceans. Linda Darnell. Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel. Shasta Fay Hepworth. Jacques Demy’s Model Shop. John Garfield. Joaquin Phoenix. Time traveler Thomas Pynchon. Drugs. Paul Thomas Anderson. “Vitamin C.” Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street. Sam Fuller vs. Film Twitter. Josh Brolin. Bigfoot Bjornsen. Neo-noir shootouts. Ralph Meeker. The ambiguities of cinema, life, and self. The cars of Neil Young. Moviegoing in the mornings. The sorrowing hope of Nick Cave. The sweet heroism of Doc Sportello. These are but a few of the subjects Travis and Kim touch upon as they watch the opening minutes of Inherent Vice and ask one another a single, obsessive question: “Why is this so heartachingly beautiful?”